Follow These Guidelines to Help Grow Your Pickup-and-Delivery Laundry Service
Managing your fleet of vehicles is an important part of building a winning pickup-and-delivery service. But it’s just one piece to the puzzle.
The question I always like to ask laundry owners who want to meet and exceed their sales goals is how their PUD service’s landing page is performing.
Sales happen online these days. And, for minimal-contact services, that’s usually a good thing. For busy professionals, tech-savvy families and individuals in need of accessible services, pickup and delivery can be life-changing. How you share your service with these audiences boils down to your landing page, which you also can refer to as a service page. Believe me when I say that there’s definitely a contrast between the good ones and the bad ones.
In this column, I want to paint a clear picture of what a good landing page can look like. A few of these suggestions are negotiable, but almost all of them can culminate in something that sells far better than an ad or a billboard alone ever could. Let’s dive in…
Go With the Flow
When building a landing page that’s designed to sell, start by creating a flow of ideas, desired imagery and idealized design elements that will help you introduce, hype and sell your service. There are tons of models to use to lay this type of groundwork – Problem-Agitate-Solution, the Toulmin Model and Monroe’s Motivated Sequence, just to name a few.
All of these, in their own ways, focus on highlighting an issue, providing your service as the solution, and then convincing the reader to take action. Utilization of data and anticipating rebuttals also is key.
However, flow is more than a model. It’s a progression of your reader’s attention to the next step, and it incorporates all aspects of a landing page – such as the color scheme, the use of whitespace, the call-to-action language used, and much more. It’s measured by how well what you write keeps someone engaged.
Here’s the tricky part though: your flow is determined by how well you connect the rest of the aspects I will share in this article. You’ve got to keep reading if you want to close this loop – and I hope you do!
Bait Your Hook
If you’ve ever been fishing, this advice comes naturally. You can’t catch a fish if there’s no bait on the hook – unless you’re lucky.
The hook you use to capture readers’ attention and keep them on your page is, in essence, everything. There’s been loads of research on user behavior and the human attention span, which in many cases is less than eight seconds. If you’ve ever doom-scrolled on your phone or mindlessly surfed through the TV channels late at night, you know that we all can make decisions about what we see on our screens instantaneously. Capturing attention and inciting action is the goal, and it starts with the hook.
What makes a good hook? That depends.
For a landing page that sells a service, I recommend a minimum of a clear value pitch. You’re trying to get the average person to ditch his or her laundry routine and utilize a service that may be perceived as more expensive, too time-consuming or maybe even weird. You can address any of those in order to hook a reader. Imagine clicking onto a landing page for a service that quips something along the lines of: “We don’t want to smell your laundry, we want to clean it!” Perhaps not the best hook to keep someone around, but certainly one that captures the attention.
There’s definitely something about your business that’s valuable though, and that’s what you need to quickly get across to a visitor. Get creative, be a bit bold and have fun with the copy you decide on. If you can’t imagine yourself reading through what you create, keep revisiting it until you get it right. No one ever tells you this, but your first draft is probably not going to be good. Write, get feedback and tweak until you land on a message that feels right for you.
Explain the Service Clearly
So, you’ve built an ideal flow and created a hook. What’s next?
Now you sell. Ask any marketer what sells best, and he or she will tell you two things: clickbait and transparency. We covered clickbait in the last section, so let’s talk about transparency.
Today’s consumers are more interested in details than ever. It’s estimated that as much as 90 percent of online sales occur without any in-person interaction – and, since pickup and delivery involve only brief real-life touches, you have to treat each online interaction as if it’s the chance to close a sale. That means sharing accessible and detail-rich information.
Think for a minute… if your customers don’t fully understand what you’re selling, how the pickup and drop-off interactions occur, or what will happen to their laundry, they most likely won’t buy. Would you? This may seem a bit basic, but it’s the fundamentals that differentiate good from great.
When you’ve hooked a reader and he or she starts to scroll down your page, the next thing that person reads should be a clear explanation of what happens. This can be as simple as: (1) schedule a pickup, (2) wait and (3) receive clean, folded clothes. In fact, if you can convey this with headings, imagery and minimal copy, you’re ahead of the game.
But don’t decide to stop with minimal copy. Give these prospective clients the option to learn more about what they can expect at pickup, how long the average wait lasts (or if delays ever occur), and how you protect their clothes during transit and delivery. All of this information will play a part in boosting the transparency and salability of your laundry service.
A few other bits of advice: use clear language and relevant iconography. I prefer a friendly, reader-forward writer style, but you may not. Formal explanations can still be effective. The key is simply having some sort of primer on the service that tells your potential customers what to expect and how to prepare. This should be at least one major section, following very quickly after your initial hook/header. The faster the reader understands you and your service, the better your chances are of closing a deal.
Be Hyper Local
With pickup-and-delivery services, you have the potential to be more specific with your marketing efforts than ever before. Brick-and-mortar laundromats generally have an effective “radius” for their marketing efforts that includes foot traffic, nearby walkable homes and buildings, and neighborhoods or districts that have convenient access. With pickup and delivery, that playbook gets thrown out.
There’s no universal best practice here just yet, but you still can be ahead of the curve by sharing whatever information is available. Many successful pickup-and-delivery services provide a searchable list of the ZIP codes that they service. Others utilize third-party services (or a POS system) that enables customers to enter their exact addresses and check your service’s range. Either of these options – or others as they emerge – are essential aspects of a successful landing page. You need to help your customers qualify themselves for your service quickly so that they can move forward with a purchase.
Once again, the positioning of this information is a key factor. It can be incredibly frustrating for someone to find a service that checks all of the boxes but doesn’t service that individual’s particular area. It’s even more frustrating if that information isn’t easy for them to discover. It can turn a lost lead into an evangelist against your brand, which is the far worse outcome. Be transparent and share this information early on your landing page.
Sell Benefits, Not Just Features
It’s completely OK for you to get a little nerdy about your services – and, honestly, I recommend it. Sharing information about the machines you use, how eco-friendly your detergent is, or how green your fleet is are all good things. However, these are features – they’re not benefits.
Customers rarely buy features. Think of the last time you bought a car. You probably didn’t go to the dealership hoping you could get a nice Bluetooth connection and seat warmers – you wanted a vehicle. That mentality exists anytime someone spends money, even at laundromats and on laundry services.
At the end of the day, you’re selling clean clothes. That’s a benefit to your buyers, and you can highlight all of the ways it positively impacts their lives. But you’re also selling much more – the convenience of skipping laundry day, the peace of mind that dirty stains will be removed, the assurance that your customers’ carbon footprint is lessened, the elation of being able to save money on getting the laundry task completed, and so on. Additionally, if you give back to your community, you can even share how patrons of pickup and delivery participate in those charitable efforts.
The aspects that make your business special to you won’t always be the same as the way your customers experience your services. That’s a dangerous gap, and it usually manifests as selling features rather than benefits. Take some time on your landing page to make sure that you don’t fall into this common trap.
Share Reviews and Social Proof
Selling through a landing page isn’t just words and photos that you generate. User-generated content – such as reviews – are one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal and should be included on a conversion-oriented page. If you’re offering pickup and delivery as a new service to an established business, it’s OK to lean on reviews that speak well of your brand. If you’re starting from scratch, find ways to quickly get some wins and ask for positive reviews or feedback. Let your customers call out specifics about what they like, and use that to show others how good you are at what you do.
To hammer this home, let me just remind you that more than 90 percent of Google users read reviews before buying from a local business. If someone finds your landing page and has to go elsewhere to see what people are saying about you, they may not come back. Don’t take that risk.
Provide Access to Supporting Content
When you’re filling out a landing page, it’s a great opportunity to share your expertise and authority on the subject material behind the services being sold. If you’ve been operating a laundry business for 30 years, you probably know a good deal about stain removal, garment care, the equipment you use, and how customers can get the biggest bang for their buck. As I mentioned earlier, this kind of information is helpful when convincing someone to give you their money.
A prime example of how to do this well is through FAQs (frequently asked questions) or blog reels. For FAQs, you can generate an extensive list of things that your customers need to know. For instance: do you provide bags? What should someone do with heavily soiled linens? Do you accept potential biohazards (blood, urine, etc.)? What happens if delivery is delayed? Does a customer need to monitor the drop-off process, or is it porch service? The list can go on and on.
Your goal here is to balance the information you share with any potential reservations someone might have about your PUD service. And do your best not to shy away from tough questions – you’ll only turn people off with vague answers.
A word of caution: don’t go overboard with how much information you share. There’s such a thing as too much, and it’s quite possible to distract a reader from your ultimate goal. The key is balance. Show expertise, but emphasize flow.
Stay Focused
Lastly, be sure you don’t get too excessive with elements that point away from your goal, which is to gain a new customer. Links to content that educate about your brand, expertise and reliability are effective compromises. Elements that you should stay away from include ads, banner distractions like navigation and even popup windows (with some exceptions). The more focused you can keep the page on educating and converting a customer, the better your chances will be of achieving your ultimate goal.
Let’s talk about exit popups for a second, because they can act as a last ditch effort to nurture an interested visitor who just isn’t ready to buy. Exit popups that don’t activate too soon, ask for contact information, and provide value or an incentive to revisit your website are effective for some businesses some of the time. From a user’s point of view, these popups can be extremely frustrating and drive them away for good – so they carry an element of risk. At the end of the day, this is a decision for you and your marketing team to discuss before implementing on a sales-heavy page.
For focus as a whole, I want to take a minute to close the loop. I started by recommending you take some time to establish a flow for your landing page. The collateral you ultimately create may not look exactly like your original idea – and that’s OK. The key is to edit. Make sure that the imagery and copy you use still pulls back to flow-based reading, conversion optimization and a reader-friendly experience. If you start with a goal and build your page around it, you’ll stay focused and see the results come in.
Pulling It All Together
Flow. Information. Benefits. Focus. When it all comes together, you’ll like what you see. Better yet, your customers will like it, too – and hopefully that means they’ll use your service over and over. Make your landing page easy to read or skim, and keep the customer in view.
So, keep that pickup-and-delivery fleet humming, and build the infrastructure you need around it so that you can focus on getting the job done. Your business will grow, your customers will thank you, and you’ll find even more opportunities on the horizon.
